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Chomsky: Instead of "Illegal" Threat to Syria, U.S. Should Back Chemical Weapons Ban in All Nations
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: In a nationally televised address, President Obama announced he was
putting off a plan to strike Syria while pursuing a diplomatic effort
from Russia for international monitors to take over and destroy Syria’s
arsenal of chemical weapons. The speech came just 10 days after he told
the nation he would ask Congress to authorize using military force. On
Tuesday night, Obama asked congressional leaders to put off a vote on
his request to authorize the use of military strikes, but he said the
military would remain ready if diplomacy fails.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: America is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the
globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with
modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death,
and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we
should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us
exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of
that essential truth.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: President Obama offered a qualified endorsement of the Russian proposal to secure Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Over the last few days, we’ve seen some encouraging signs, in part
because of the credible threat of U.S. military action, as well as
constructive talks that I had with President Putin. The Russian
government has indicated a willingness to join with the international
community in pushing Assad to give up his chemical weapons. The Assad
regime has now admitted that it has these weapons, and even said they’d
join the chemical weapons convention, which prohibits their use. It’s
too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement
must verify that the Assad regime keeps its commitments. But this
initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons
without the use of force, particularly because Russia is one of Assad’s
strongest allies.
I have therefore asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote to
authorize the use of force while we pursue this diplomatic path. I’m
sending Secretary of State John Kerry to meet his Russian counterpart on
Thursday, and I will continue my own discussions with President Putin.
I’ve spoken to the leaders of two of our closest allies—France and the
United Kingdom—and we will work together in consultation with Russia and
China to put forward a resolution at the U.N. Security Council
requiring Assad to give up his chemical weapons and to ultimately
destroy them under international control. We’ll also give U.N.
inspectors the opportunity to report their findings about what happened
on August 21st. And we will continue to rally support from allies from
Europe to the Americas, from Asia to the Middle East, who agree on the
need for action. Meanwhile, I’ve ordered our military to maintain their
current posture, to keep pressure on Assad and to be in a position to
respond if diplomacy fails.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about President Obama’s speech and the crisis in Syria,
we’re joined by the world-renowned political dissident, linguist,
author, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky. He has authored numerous books. His latest is On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare, that’s out next week. He joins us via Democracy Now! video stream from his home in Massachusetts.
Noam, welcome to Democracy Now! First, let’s get your response to President Obama announcing last night
in a nationwide address, which I’m sure was watched worldwide, that for
the moment there would be no strike on Syria, as the U.S. supports the
Russian plan to deal with the chemical weapons stockpile of Syria?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the Russian plan is a godsend for Obama. It saves him from what
would look like a very serious political defeat. He has not been able to
obtain virtually any international support for this—the action he’s
contemplating. Even Britain wouldn’t support it. And it looked as though
Congress wasn’t going to support it either, which would leave him
completely out on a limb. This leaves him a way out.
He can maintain the threat of force, which
incidentally is a crime under international law, that we should bear in
mind that the core principle of the United Nations Charter bars the
threat or use of force, threat or use of force. So all of this is
criminal, to begin with, but he’ll continue with that. The United States
is a rogue state. It doesn’t pay any attention to international law.
He—it was kind of interesting what he didn’t
say. This would be a perfect opportunity to ban chemical weapons, to
impose the chemical weapons convention on the Middle East. The
convention, contrary to what Obama said, does not specifically refer
just to use of chemical weapons; it refers to production, storage or use
of chemical weapons. That’s banned by the international norm that Obama
likes to preach about. Well, there is a country which happens to
be—happens to have illegally annexed part of Syrian territory, which has
chemical weapons and is in violation of the chemical weapons convention
and has refused even to ratify it—namely, Israel. So here’s an
opportunity to eliminate chemical weapons from the region, to impose the
chemical weapons convention as it’s actually formulated. But Obama was
very careful not to say that he—for reasons which are too obvious to go
into—he—and that gap is highly significant. Of course, chemical weapons
should be eliminated everywhere, but certainly in that region.
The other things that he said were not
unusual, but nevertheless kind of shocking to anyone not familiar with
U.S. political discourse, at least. So he described the United—he said
that for seven decades the United States has been "the anchor of global
security." Really? Seven decades? That includes, for example, just 40
years ago today, when the United States played a major role in
overthrowing the parliamentary democracy of Chile and imposing a brutal
dictatorship, called "the first 9/11" in Latin America. Go back earlier
years, overthrowing the parliamentary system in Iran, imposing a
dictatorship; same in Guatemala a year later; attacking Indochina, the
worst crime in the postwar period, killing millions of people; attacking
Central America; killing—involved in killing—in imposing a dictatorship
in the Congo; and invading Iraq—on and on. That’s stability? I mean,
that a Harvard Law School graduate can pronounce those words is pretty
amazing, as is the fact that they’re accepted without comment.
So what he said is I’m going to lie like a
trooper about history; I’m going to suppress the U.S. role, the actual
U.S. role, for the last seven decades; I’m going to maintain the threat
of force, which is of course illegal; and I’m going to ensure that the
chemical weapons convention is not imposed on the region, because our
ally, Israel, would be subjected to it. And I think those are some of
the main points of his address.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist, political
dissident. We’re going to go to break and then spend the hour with him
on President Obama’s policy and what’s happening in the Middle East.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Professor Noam Chomsky. We’re going to turn
again back to President Obama, who addressed part of his speech to the
nation last night to opponents of military action on the right and left.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: My fellow Americans, for nearly seven decades, the United States has
been the anchor of global security. This has meant doing more than
forging international agreements; it has meant enforcing them. The
burdens of leadership are often heavy, but the world is a better place
because we have borne them. And so, to my friends on the right, I ask
you to reconcile your commitment to America’s military might with a
failure to act when a cause is so plainly just; to my friends on the
left, I ask you to reconcile your belief in freedom and dignity for all
people with those images of children writhing in pain and going still on
a cold hospital floor—for sometimes resolutions and statements of
condemnation are simply not enough. Indeed, I’d ask every member of
Congress and those of you watching at home tonight to view those videos
of the attack and then ask: What kind of world will we live in if the
United States of America sees a dictator brazenly violate international
law with poison gas and we choose to look the other way?
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama addressing the nation last night. Professor
Noam Chomsky, your response to his description of those who oppose
military strike against Syria for a chemical weapons attack?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, once again, what’s particularly interesting is what he didn’t
say. So, yes, a good idea to look at the videos of the gas attack in
Syria. But then we could also look at the photos of deformed fetuses in
Saigon hospitals still appearing decades after John F. Kennedy launched a
major chemical warfare attack against South Vietnam, 1961, dousing the
country with poisonous dioxin-laced Agent Orange. Dioxin is one of the
major carcinogens. The attack was aimed at food crops, in an effort—and
at ground cover, part of a general assault against the country—a huge
number of atrocities, millions of people killed. The chemical—the
effects of chemical warfare are felt until today, partially by American
soldiers, too. Or we could look at the photos of other deformed fetuses
coming regularly in Fallujah, attacked by U.S. Marines in November 2004,
killing several thousand people, destroying much of the town, using
weapons which—of unknown character, but which left radiation levels that
epidemiologists have estimated are comparable to Hiroshima. And the
effects of that on high cancer rates, on deformed fetuses, on children
devastated by horrifying deformities, that we could look at, too. Now,
those are the ways in which the U.S. has brought—has been the anchor for
global security for seven decades. Can run through the record, if there
were time, but everyone should know it. These, of course—that’s not
said.
The U.S.—the idea that the U.S. has introduced
and imposed principles of international law, that’s hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council
resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was
in the 1980s under Reagan. No state was mentioned, but it was evident
that the intention was to request the United States to observe
international law, after it had rejected a World Court judgment
condemning it for what was called unlawful use of force—it means
international terrorism—against Nicaragua. In fact, the U.S. has been a
rogue state, the leading rogue state, radically violating international
law, refusing to accept international conventions. There’s hardly any
international conventions that the U.S. has accepted, and those few that
it has accepted are conditioned so as to be inapplicable to the United
States. That’s true even of the genocide convention. The United States
is self-authorized to commit genocide. In fact, that was accepted by the
International Court of Justice. In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO,
one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying
that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide,
self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded
against the other NATO powers but not against
the United States. In fact, the United States, when it joined the World
Court—it helped introduce the modern World Court in 1946, and joined the
World Court, but with a reservation. The reservation is that
international agreements, laws, do not apply to the United States. So
the U.N. Charter, the charter of the Organization of American States,
the U.S. is immune to their—self-immunized to their requirements against
the threat and use of force, intervention and so on.
It’s kind of astonishing. I mean, by now it’s
hard to be astonished, but it should be astonishing that a president of
the United States, who is furthermore a constitutional lawyer or a
graduate of Harvard Law School, can say things like this, in the full
knowledge that the facts are exactly the opposite, radically the
opposite. And there are millions and millions of victims who can testify
to that. Right today is—happens to be an important date, the 40th
anniversary of the overthrow of the parliamentary democracy of Chile,
with substantial U.S. aid, because we insisted on having a vicious
dictatorship, which became a major international terror center with our
support, rather than allowing a Democratic Socialist government. Well,
that’s—these are some of the realities of the world. Now, the picture
that the president presented is—it doesn’t even merit the name fairy
tale.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Professor Noam Chomsky, why do you think that the U.S. so quickly
started to push for military strikes? And what do you think the U.S. or
the international community should do to deal with this alleged use of
chemical weapons in Syria? What do you think the appropriate response
would be?
NOAM CHOMSKY: The appropriate response would be to call for imposing the chemical
weapons convention in the Middle East—in fact beyond, but we’ll keep to
the Middle East—which would mean that any country that is in violation
of that convention, whether it has accepted it or not, would be
compelled to eliminate its chemical weapons stores. Just maintaining
those stores, producing chemical weapons, all of that’s in violation of
the convention, and now is a perfect opportunity to do that. Of course,
that would require that U.S. ally Israel give up its chemical weapons
and permit international inspections. Incidentally, this should extend
to nuclear weapons, as well. The further step would be to move towards
the kinds of negotiations, Geneva negotiations, that the U.N.
negotiator, Lakhdar Brahimi, has been calling for, with Russian support
and with the United States kind of dragging its feet. Obama misstated
that, too, last night. That’s the one thin hope, and it’s pretty thin,
for some way to allow Syria to escape what is in fact a plunged, virtual
suicide.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And why do you think the U.S. started to push for military action so swiftly?
NOAM CHOMSKY: As it always does. The United States is a violent military state. It’s
been involved in military action all over the place. It invaded South
Vietnam, practically destroyed Indochina, invaded Iraq, elicited a
Sunni-Shia conflict, which is now tearing the region to shreds. I don’t
have to run through the rest of the record. But the United States moves
very quickly to military action, unilaterally. It can—sometimes can get
some allies to go along. In this case, it can’t even do that. And it’s
just a routine. The United States is self-immunized from international
law, which bans the threat or use of force. And this is taken for
granted here. So, for example, when President Obama repeatedly says all
options are open with regard to Iran, that’s a violation of fundamental
international law. It says we are using the threat of force, in
violation of international law, to which we are self-immunized. There’s
nothing new about this. Can you think of any other country that’s used
military force internationally on anything remotely like the scale of
the United States during these seven decades when, according to Obama,
we’ve been the anchor of global security?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Noam Chomsky, supporters of the U.S. plan say that the only
reason that Assad agreed to hand over, relinquish control over chemical
weapons was because of the threat of military force, of U.S. military
force. And what interest does the U.S. have in striking Syria
militarily?
NOAM CHOMSKY: The first comment is correct. The threat and use of force can be
effective. So, for example, Russia was able to control Eastern Europe
for 50 years with the threat and occasional use of force. Hitler was
able to take over Czechoslovakia with the threat of force. Yes, it often
works, no doubt. That’s one of the reasons it’s banned under
international—under international law.
The reason—the pretexts for imposing—for
carrying out a forceful act have generally declined, to the point that
even the British government hasn’t accepted them, and the Congress was
apparently going to reject them, and the United States, the government,
resorted to the—what is usually the last—the last resort, when
everything else fails, saying our credibility is at stake. That’s
correct. U.S. credibility is at stake. Obama issued an edict, and it has
to be enforced. That’s a familiar doctrine. It’s one of the leading
doctrines of world affairs. Credibility of powerful, violent states must
be maintained. It’s—occasionally called it the Mafia doctrine. It’s
essentially the doctrine by which the godfather rules his domains within
the Mafia system. That’s one of the leading principles of world order:
Credibility has to be maintained.
But that has many variants. Sometimes it’s
called the domino theory. If we don’t impose our will here, the dominoes
will start to fall, others will begin to be disobedient. In the case of
Chile 40 years ago, to go back to that, what Latin Americans called the
first 9/11, Henry Kissinger explained that Chile, under Allende, he
said, is a virus that might spread contagion elsewhere, all the way to
southern Europe. And he wasn’t saying that Chilean troops were going to
land in Rome. He was concerned, rightly, that the model of peaceful,
parliamentary democracy might spread, in which case the contagion would
spread beyond, and the U.S. system of domination would erode.
Just earlier on the program, you had an
interview with Saul Landau, the late Saul Landau, with regard to [Cuba],
and exactly the same doctrine applies there. The U.S. carried
out—invaded Cuba, Bay of Pigs invasion. When that failed, Kennedy
launched an enormous terrorist campaign, murderous terrorist campaign.
The goal was to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba, as Arthur
Schlesinger described it, Kennedy’s adviser, Latin American adviser. It
was in the hands of Robert Kennedy, and it was no joke. It was very
serious. Now, that’s been followed by 50 years of economic warfare, very
harsh economic warfare, all unilateral. The world was overwhelmingly
opposed to it. But it doesn’t matter: We, as a rogue state, we do what
we like. And the reasons are explicit in the internal record. The
reasons, you go back to the early '60s, the internal government record
explains that Castro is guilty of what they called "successful defiance"
of the U.S. principles going back to the Monroe Doctrine, 1823—no
Russians, just the Monroe Doctrine, which established, in principle, our
right to dominate the hemisphere. The U.S. wasn't powerful enough to do
it then, but that was the principle, and Castro is carrying out
"successful defiance" of that principle, therefore he must—Cuba must be
subjected to massive terrorism, economic warfare and strangulation.
That’s been going on for 50 years. Same principle, the Mafia principle.
The same was true in Vietnam. The primary
motive for the Indochina wars, going back to the early 1950s, was
presented here as the domino theory. But what that meant was, if you
read the internal records, that there was a fear, a justified fear, that
successful independent development in Vietnam might spread through the
region, might spread contagion through the region. Others would attempt
the same path, that itself was of no great significance, but it might
spread as far as Indonesia, which has rich resources, and there, too,
there might be a move towards independent development, independent of
U.S. domination. And it was even feared that that might bring in Japan.
John Dower, the famous Asia historian, described Japan as the
"superdomino." The U.S. was concerned, deeply concerned, that if
Southeast Asia moved toward independent development, Japan would
"accommodate," the word that was used, to East and Southeastern Asia,
becoming its technological industrial center and creating a system, an
Asian system, from which the U.S. would maybe not be excluded, but at
least which it wouldn’t control. Now, the U.S. had fought the Second
World War to prevent that. That’s Japan’s new order, and it was in
danger of being reconstituted if Indochina gained independence. That’s
the domino theory. And that was understood. McGeorge Bundy,
Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, in retrospect, observed that
the Vietnam War—the United States should have called off the Vietnam War
in 1965. Why 1965? Well, because in 1965 a U.S.-backed military coup
took place in Indonesia, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people,
wiping out the only mass-based political party and instituting a regime
of torture and terror, but opening the country up to Western
exploitation, with its rich resources, and that meant that the Vietnam
War was essentially over. The U.S. had won its main objectives. It was
pointless to continue it.
Now, this policy is—these are major principles
of world affairs, and they’re understandable, and they’re understood.
So, go back to Cuba again. When Kennedy came into office, he was
concerned with changing Latin American policy. He developed the—set up a
Latin American research commission. It was headed by Arthur
Schlesinger, his historian who was his adviser, and they came out with a
report. It was presented by Schlesinger to the president. And in it,
Schlesinger described the problem of Cuba. He said the problem of Cuba
is the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands, an idea which
may have resonance in other parts of Latin America, where the mass of
the population is subjected to the same kind of harsh repression that
they are in Cuba. And if this idea spreads, the U.S. system of control
erodes. Well, going back to the Middle East, it’s the same.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we’re going to go back to the Middle East just when we come back
from break. We want to ask you about Syria in the larger Middle East
context, particularly looking at Iran and looking at Israel. And, of
course, as you point out, this is major date in history. Forty years ago
today, September 11, 1973, in Chile, Salvador Allende died in the
palace as the Pinochet forces rose to power. And it is also the 12th
anniversary of the September 11th attacks. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a moment.
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